Climbing Cringe Mountain

#BR42

New Zealand was in what I assumed would be a short recession. (It wasn't.) There was no plan B: there weren't many jobs around, and hardly any senior ones.

I'd owned Europa for eight years by then, but for most of that time it was a side hustle. Building it up from nothing would take two things.

The first was drinking my own Kool-Aid. I'd built brand ecosystems for businesses for years, and the leader's own brand was always part of them. I'd seen how powerful it is. I knew how the system works. The channels change from client to client, but the basic idea stays the same.

The second was climbing Cringe Mountain. In real life, I'm fairly extroverted. On social media, much less so. I love the creative side of marketing: writing, producing, making things. But writing for others and talking about yourself are two different things. I needed to push through some discomfort about creating work-related content centred on me personally.

But I knew I had to bite the bullet. It's like running a shop. Every morning you put the sandwich board out on the footpath, whether you feel like it or not. If you don't, nobody knows you're open.

That's when it clicked for me, and it's what I'd say to any owner or leader of a business (big or small):

Why is this so important? In the 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn study of nearly 2,000 business decision-makers, 79% said they're more likely to champion a supplier that consistently publishes good thinking. People buy from people they've heard from.

B2B sales cycles are long. Before anyone signs, they need to trust you. To trust you, they need to know you and like you.

Bob Burg put it best in Endless Referrals back in 1994: all things being equal, people do business with, and refer business to, people they know, like and trust. Thirty years on, that's still the whole game. Your channels are how people get to know you before they ever need you.

I'm a restless kind of guy. Easily bored. Every so often I get sick of feeding the marketing beast in the high-touch way I choose to do it. Writing on LinkedIn and here, recording, editing, turning up. It's a lot of extra work on top of the actual work, and in some early weeks it felt like shouting into a well.

And you can almost set your clock by what happens next. Right about when I'm thinking, "really, is this worth anything?", the phone rings. Usually it's someone I know or have met who says they've been reading for a while. Another opportunity turns up.

And I remember why I do it. I spent years cold calling, so I know how relentlessly hard that is. When a lead turns up warm, already knowing what I'm about and ready to talk, I'm grateful every time.

Going viral is overrated.

My most-read LinkedIn post ever was a story about selling coffee door to door in London. It reached 32,000 people. Lovely. But viral posts pull in a general crowd. The people who saw it were far less senior than the people who actually follow me.

You could have 2,000 followers and still be screaming into the void if none of them are people you could ever work with.

What I've built over the last few years is smaller and much more useful. It’s not just potential clients: it’s supporters, peers, and suppliers. And my family! The support network every small business needs. I'm really proud of that small but mighty group of people in my orbit.

(Yes, that includes you, you lovely person.)

There's a catch with all of this. Most of it lives on land you rent, and the landlord can change the rules overnight.

So my rule is this. Start with one channel and get properly good at it. Then move quickly to add channels that talk to each other, so no single landlord can switch you off.

At Europa, four channels feed each other, and each does one job.

LinkedIn is where people find me a lot of the time. I post regularly, comment regularly, and most importantly: work in my DMs behind the scenes.

Events and community build trust fastest. Speaking at a careers event in March brought 97 new followers in three days.

The podcast gives depth. Slideshow with Dave Hayward lets me spend an hour with someone smart, and my audience gets a lovely parasocial hour in their ears while walking the dog or loading the dishwasher.

This newsletter is the one I own. No algorithm sits between us. It's where the other channels lead, and it's where most of my leads came from this year.

One way to keep an ecosystem like this going: make one big piece of content, then reshape it for each channel.

Here's what that looks like in practice. A couple of editions ago, "Words are free now. Your reader's time isn't" became our most-read Bright Objects ever. So I turned it into a ten-minute solo episode of Slideshow.

A newsletter became a podcast. The podcast becomes LinkedIn posts. Those become a chat over coffee at an event. An ecosystem of elements that relate, inform, and enhance each other.

I went to two workshops recently, run by two people I admire a lot, and you should check them out if you get a chance.

Talica Davies: Feast or Famine. Her line that stuck: "Famine is booked." What you do (or skip) this week shows up one sales cycle later. Marketing gets you attention and sales turns it into money. If the bit in between leaks, more attention just gets you to the famine faster.

Mina Amso: the Million Dollar Podcast. Mina is a former journalist and the host of Notes From The Executive. Her belief: "Clarity beats being qualified." Twenty podcast appearances are worth nothing if listeners don't leave with one clear idea.

Links, as always, are in the Sources / further reading section at the end. And, speaking of workshops…

Glad you asked! I'm running a workshop on building your personal brand ecosystem on Thursday 26 November, 12pm NZDT (10am AEDT, Sydney), online. We'll work through your channels, what each one is for, and how to get them talking to each other, using your own audience as the example. You'll leave with a framework for your own ecosystem, tools to build your content strategy, and a clearer sense of your voice.

Four people have already signed up. If you'd like to join them, it's NZ$175 + GST.

Cheers, Dave